Omni Farmer: robots that harvest and pollinate strawberries

The robots

Metafarmers reports Omni Farmer running at farms in Dongtan (Hwaseong), Sangju and Seosan. In November 2025 the cucumber-harvesting version finished KTL certification tests of harvest rate and speed.

The problem

The robots had to localize and navigate across a 100 × 200 m farm that has few stable features to anchor a map to.

We first tried to localize with a single 3D LiDAR to keep the sensor set minimal. That was not reliable enough on this site, so the final system adds a 2D LiDAR and combines 3D LiDAR odometry with 2D mapping.

The approach

I defined the ROS 2 architecture from the motor control boards up to navigation. The stack, from top to bottom:

Results

My part

As Robotics Software Team Lead I built and led the seven-person Robotics AI team.

• Defined the ROS 2 architecture across embedded control, perception and navigation.
• Designed the UART packet protocol and the embedded platform between the motor and sensor boards and ROS 2, with wheel-speed PID on the motor controllers.
• Built perception: multi-object tracking, 3D reconstruction through colored voxelization, and long-term SLAM fusing FAST-LIO odometry with Cartographer.
• Delivered autonomous navigation on Nav2 and moved task execution to a C++ behavior tree.

Press